The electronics industry is continually called upon to make products smaller and more powerful. Applications such as mobile phones, portable computers, computer accessories, hand-held electronics, etc., create a large demand for smaller electronic components. These applications further drive technology to research new areas and ideas with respect to miniaturizing electronics and often require “low profile” components due to constraints in height and width. Unfortunately, the technology is often limited due to the inability to make certain circuits and components smaller, faster, or more powerful. Nowhere can this be seen more than in the struggle to manufacture smaller electronic circuits and components which take up less space on a substrate, such as a printed circuit board (“PCB”).
Originally, individual components had to be mounted on a PCB by inserting the leads of the component through holes in the PCB and soldering them to solder pads on the opposite side of the PCB, (called through-hole technology). This technique left half of the PCB unpopulated because one side had to be reserved for solder pads and solder and required enough space on the PCB to mount each individual component. Therefore, in order to fit more components in a particular circuit, the PCBs were made larger, or additional PCBs were required. Many times, however, these options were not available due to constraints in size for the PCBs.
A solution to this problem came in the form of Surface-Mount Devices (“SMD”), or Surface-Mount Technology. SMDs allow electronic devices or components to be mounted on one side of a substrate, (i.e., without having leads inserted through holes in the substrate). An SMD device has small metalized pads (solder pads, terminals or leads) connected to its body, which correspond to solder pads or lands placed on the surface of the substrate. Typically the substrate is run through a solder-paste machine, such as a screen printer, which puts a small amount of solder on the substrate lands. Then, the component is placed on the substrate, and the substrate and SMD device are sent through a re-flow oven to heat the solder paste and solder the component leads to the substrate lands (“reflow soldering”). The primary advantage to this technique is that both sides of the substrate can now be populated by electronic components. Meaning one substrate today can hold an amount of electronic components approximately equal to two substrates in the past.
Another solution to this problem was the development of the integrated circuit (“IC”), which allowed circuits made up of multiple electronic components to be combined into one packaged component. This allowed more components to be mounted on a substrate and reduced the amount of substrate space used (and therefore needed) by replacing multiple individual electronic components with one IC package. This also lowered manufacturing times for assembling electronics by reducing the number of components that had to be mounted to the substrate. Today, substrates continue to be populated with ICs and individual electronic components that have not been incorporated into an IC package (“discrete components”).
As a result of these advances in technology, current electronic circuits are mainly limited by the size and number of components needed to be used on the PCB. Meaning, if the electronic components are made smaller or fewer components are needed for a particular circuit, the circuit can be made smaller as well. Unfortunately, there are some electronic components that a circuit cannot due without and that cannot be produced any smaller than they currently are without sacrificing something, (e.g., performance, structural integrity, etc.). Usually this is because the desired parameters for the component cannot be achieved when using smaller parts. Good examples of this are coil components, such as for example, inductors, antennas, transformers, chokes and the like. Certain parameters of these components are affected by the size of the parts used. For instance, in inductors, wire gauge determines both the DC resistance and the current carrying ability of the component. In other examples, the component may be capable of being made in a smaller size, but incapable of performing comparably to the original larger version of the component, (e.g., with comparable inductance, frequency range, Q-value, self-resonant frequency, or the like).
Accordingly, it has been determined that the need exists for an improved electronic component which overcomes the aforementioned limitations and which further provides capabilities, features and functions, not available in current devices and for a method of conserving space in a circuit.